In La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, an hour from Paris, Marco Martella (Rome, 60 years old) has finally planted many trees.
He talks about the garden from the garden of the house that he shares with Pascal, his partner for 33 years.
The interview takes place in motion: looking for the views or the sun and chasing his heteronyms: the Icelander Jorn de Précy —who signed
The Lost Garden
— and the Bosnian Teodor Cerić, who wrote, by Martella's hand,
Gardens in Times of War
.
Can you break with nature?
It is a utopia of Western man that was theorized by Descartes when he spoke of man as lord of nature.
We are part of it and we depend on its energy.
He would say that all the unhappiness of man comes from that, from believing himself capable of controlling nature.
Separating ourselves from nature we declare war on life.
Our way of life moves further and further away from the rhythms of nature.
And it is not possible to live outside of nature.
Everything is nature.
For the Greeks, nature, the
physis
, included everything: men, days, plants... On the other hand, the Latin concept of nature already implies a distance.
It begins to be studied from the outside, seeing it as an object and placing man as a subject.
"In the great desert that the world has become, all that remains is the garden."
The garden is reborn.
It is a place of hope.
Sometimes we forget that ability to be reborn, to try again, which, in part, we have.
Gardens remind us that death is part of life.
What hope does the garden offer?
When you plant a tree you project yourself in time.
You are saying that you believe that life is going to go on.
And that men are going to help that life.
Garden time is life time.
It does not push us forward like the mechanical time that currently rules our lives.
When did you plant your first tree?
With my father, in Rome.
But six years ago, I planted those in our garden.
What relationship does it have with the trees you planted and abandoned?
One does not enter a garden as a conqueror, but as a guest.
I don't forget those trees.
But I don't own them.
In Puglia we had a house that is no longer ours, but the garden continues to grow.
We will go and the gardens will stay.
Or they will become a shopping mall.
Effectively.
The garden has the force of life.
And that is why it is a place of extreme fragility.
How have you chosen which trees to plant?
Thinking in the future.
The landscapers of the 17th century —then called garden architects— presented their projects explaining what they would be like in 100 years.
They were leaps of faith.
Versailles was the king's garden, but not the king of gardens.
It was a spectacle for the king.
Not the understanding of nature.
It was the image of power, the illustration of the Cartesian idea of man as possessor of nature.
It reflects the dream of greatness of a sovereign.
His desire for power over men, over the country, over the cosmos.
The man who sees himself as a god.
Marco Martella. Ed Alcock
When you make a small garden, do you touch the divine?
The gardener takes care of the garden and the garden takes care of the gardener.
A good one knows how to step aside, follow the demands of nature.
The garden does not exist without the gardener, but nature does.
Of course.
The border is subtle and fluid.
Gilles Clément's third landscape is not landscape, it is nature.
The garden is a human project.
It is the meeting place between man, plants, water and the sky.
A closed place where wonderful things and terrible things can happen.
The gardens are mirrors.
They portray us as a society and individually.
They talk about our idea of life.
Today, that we have such an arrogant relationship with nature, there are more public gardens than ever.
We need gardens.
But today they have lost their aesthetic vocation.
The beauty of the big trees is as important as the oxygen.
Ecology cannot neglect beauty.
What is the beauty of the garden?
What moves you
Something that makes you change the relationship with time and with yourself.
The estrangement from nature is the estrangement from spirituality.
It is forgetting or denying half of who we are.
It is not a religious idea.
It is a humanist idea.
What is sacred to you?
The manifestation of life.
María Zambrano explains it: the sacred is born from the manifestations of the force of nature: lightning, a storm.
It is something infinitely great that we will never get to know, life as a force that goes beyond what man knows or wants to see.
For the Greeks, the greatest sin was excess.
They had a great sense of proportion.
Today excess seems the goal.
Versailles was the first model of excess.
And it has become a model for relating to the world: technology tells us that we have no limits, the planet says the opposite.
Without limits, we stop being human.
The Greeks wrote it in the Pillars of Hercules:
Non plus ultra
, there is no beyond.
It was the limit of the human.
However, Carlos V took only part of the motto,
plus ultra
, beyond.
And today we are all in the
plus ultra
.
Without limit, without accepting what we are.
Is there a power that knows limits?
The owners of the Roman villas of the 16th and 17th centuries left their gardens open for the humble to learn there while contemplating the beauty of nature and art.
The beautiful old parks were not made for princes, but for anyone who could behave there like a prince.
It is not ownership that gives you things, but knowing them.
That educates, allows you to be better.
He did not associate his first garden with enjoyment and learning, but with effort.
On the outskirts of Rome my father had a house.
Working there, he only saw obligation and effort.
However, it was my father who took me to the garden.
When he got sick, I was already living in France and I came back to take care of him.
At the hospital I read the newspaper to him and one day I told him that they had restored the secret gardens of Villa Borghese.
My father told me that he should go see them.
What was he doing in France?
Live with Pascal.
Did you come to France for love?
Yes. He already had a job and I had just finished my studies in English literature.
France did not call me.
She has been with him for 33 years.
Everything has changed except the fact that we are together.
He went from teaching Italian to working in gardens and writing about them.
The secret gardens of the Renaissance and Baroque villas were attached to the houses, they were reached through a small door and only the owners could enter.
It was a garden within a garden to be able to be calm.
When I visited the Villa Borghese I thought it was a garden reborn.
It seemed magic.
That happened while my father was dying.
And it was like my fall from the horse: I converted.
I decided to dedicate myself to gardens.
Memories of childhood with my father came back to me.
The earth is full of seeds.
Without adequate water, light or wind, many never emerge.
They don't grow, but they don't die.
They are there, waiting.
With that seed he returned to France and studied landscaping.
At Versailles.
Gardening is an essential field for people who cannot find a place in the world.
Then I found a job in the management of parks and gardens in the Hauts-de-Seine.
Was he happier than teaching Italian?
Much more.
Until I was 30 years old I worked as a teacher to live, but without a vocation.
I didn't know what I wanted to do in life.
And my father's death revealed it to me.
The death of a loved one is an earthquake that transforms you.
What happened to your mother?
He also died young, at the age of 60.
He spoke little.
He had a difficult childhood, without a father and with an absent mother.
But he had memories of happiness when he would visit his father's family in Palermo.
And those memories happened in a garden.
Suddenly everything added up.
Or I saw it that way.
My parents were very reserved.
Did they experience their homosexuality as a problem?
No. I have realized that people's reaction to sexual matters has nothing to do with their cultural level.
There are great intellectuals with a mental block to understand their own or others' homosexuality.
However, in the Catholic camp I did not find that rejection.
Marco Martella, photographed at his home in Verdelot, east of Paris. Ed Alcock
Is a garden a place to isolate?
It may be, but it's not a cell.
And it's hard to imagine growing a garden not to share it.
He dedicates his life to gardens and has not designed one.
I have worked as a gardener in the Tuileries.
And it is demystifying to plant a thousand bulbs a day.
It looks like a factory assembly line.
The gardener of the public garden, paid to clean and do repetitive tasks that do not require his creativity, his intelligence or his heart, drowns.
The real gardener does not have much in common with modernity.
He is one of the last dissidents of the modern world, one of the few who dare to disobey by living according to his own principles and not according to those imposed by society.
The supposed progress.
It has destroyed the landscape.
The contemporary landscape does not squeeze beauty.
It portrays other priorities.
For farmers, the beautiful and the useful are the same.
An olive tree that bears fruit is beautiful.
They are not inseparable.
We have lost that.
The landscape today expresses functionality, mobility..., it does not think about the future, it thinks about survival.
Does the garden require abandoning profitability to achieve its transformative power?
Modernity does not have a garden because it is only interested in making money.
Large projects seek to alter things: coexistence, ecology, sport.
And they are civic infrastructures, rarely places of culture.
The great aesthetic project to which the human being is capable of aspiring is lost.
What does he live on?
From books, from giving lectures...
In his books there are games and information.
Why did she decide to write with heteronyms?
I have a magazine called
Jardins
.
I was looking for someone to write about Derek Jarman's garden.
Since I couldn't find it, I did it myself and signed as Jorn de Précy, a pseudonym.
Since there is a short biography at the end of the magazine, I invented a life for him and he became a heteronym.
I wanted to write about
genius loci
and I thought the essay that came out was boring.
At that time I was interested in wise and marginal characters, like William Morris.
And I imagined someone with that culture.
The ideas were mine, but the narrator, a nineteenth-century Icelander living in Oxfordshire.
Signing as the Bosnian Teodor Cerić described how the 17th century English bourgeois employed people like hermits to decorate their gardens.
It was a fashion.
Literature rescues what happened to save it from oblivion.
The man disguised as a hermit in his story ends up becoming a hermit.
In my story, yes.
In the real one, the hermits couldn't stand it.
They ran away.
They would go out to the
pub
and everyone knew they were performing.
That is why there was an owner who, in the end, it was he who played the hermit.
After using two heteronyms, he begins to sign his latest books.
What happened?
Borges said that young people need to write masked, to camouflage themselves so as not to reveal themselves completely.
That was the same.
At a certain point I didn't need to hide anymore.
Did the readers find it funny?
Most yes.
Some got angry.
There is a kind of literary moralism: the writer must tell the truth.
I agree: he tells the truth by lying.
Pessoa said: the poet is a feigner.
Literature is that: the game of being another.
As Martella wrote
A Small World
,
A Perfect World
.
Is that a garden?
The garden is wild by nature.
And at the same time, a place of hope.
One of his
Fleurs
characters argues that art is an attempt to escape the brutality of nature.
You don't think that.
No. That's why I put it in the mouth of a character, perhaps invented.
In Eastern philosophy there is no separation between human culture and culture of nature.
The culture-nature opposition is a modern vision.
The anthropologist Philippe Descola has written
Par-delà nature et culture
, defending that culture is part of nature.
Is getting lost in the woods necessary?
I've only gotten lost once, in Yosemite Park.
I was with Pascal and other friends and I got lost.
There were no cell phones.
I realized how protected we live.
I tried to control the fear.
I walked until I saw lights.
In the forest one realizes the fragility of man.
My cat is out all night and comes back with a mouse.
Write in French.
I like to write in a language that is not mine.
It's a linguistic mask, I write as if I were French.
What is an authentic garden?
Perhaps the one that does not betray the ancient vocation of being a space that nourishes the body and mind.
I don't want to sound mystical or pedantic, but gardens have a soul.
And that is what must emerge in them.
They are not just a place to play sports.
Are today's gardens those of disobedience?
The gardens always demonstrate against order.
They are the last spaces of freedom.
The garden is an unsubmissive place, outside the rules.
Contrary to the capitalist system, which needs uninterrupted growth to survive, demanding infinite efforts from men, the natural world grows spontaneously and is self-sufficient in an eternal present.
This is the lesson of the garden.
What makes a good gardener?
Know the plants well.
Getting to think a little like them.
Caring for plants is paying attention to them.
They tell you the water they need.
Will the gardens survive?
As long as there are human beings who seek to resume the dialogue with nature, yes.
To wonder what will become of the garden is to wonder what will become of humanity.
The future of the garden is that of man.
Taking care of the garden means taking care of the world.
It is a strategic place.
Even if it is closed, its effect is not locked.
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